Fair play

The Lunatics have taken over the asylum again, just in time to compete with the Easter Show. But will Luna Park end up like Wonderland? Jacqueline Maley reports.

LUNA PARK REOPENING CELEBRATION CONCERTBig Top, Luna ParkTonight at 8$85Bookings 9266 4800Ticket price includes free rides from 6Luna Park will be open Monday to Thursday and Sundays, 11am-6pm, Fridays, 11am-midnight and Saturdays, 10am-midnightEntry to the park is free, but rides start from $3Craig Robson conducts tours of the park and its mechanical musical instruments on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10am, $19.50

Craig Robson owns the Taj Mahal.

Not the 17th-century Indian mausoleum, but the giant 1920s pipe organ, adorned with 1200 pipes, drums and percussion instruments.

Robson's Taj Mahal was purchased specifically for tonight's reopening of Luna Park. With its carvings of Aphrodite, St Cecilia, good-luck dragons and Grecian urns of plenty, it was "all built for love, prosperity and good luck", he says.

The latest reopening of Sydney's most beloved amusement park has been five years and more than $100 million in the making. Several previous makeovers and relaunches have failed.

Luna Park needs plenty of love, prosperity and good luck.

When the park opened in 1935, Australia was in the grip of a worldwide depression, and the Harbour Bridge had only existed for three years. Local critics objected to the park, saying it would attract undesirables. One clergyman even worried the amusement park would encourage "orgies which couldn't be checked".

But in 2004, when Mardi Gras is one of the biggest events on the Sydney calendar, the real worry for Luna Park is that it won't be popular enough.

Luna Park first closed in 1979 after seven people died in a fire on the Ghost Train. Since then, it has had more comebacks than John Travolta.

Every attempt to make it a viable concern has been defeated by residents' complaints and planning difficulties.

In 1999, Michael Edgley's Metro Edgley, which runs George Street's Metro Theatre, won the contract to operate the site. Since then, the company has spent $100 million on the park's makeover.

Warwick Doughty, the director of the entire project, is convinced it will succeed this time.

"There is not a slight bit of doubt in my mind," he says. "When I go to sleep at night, I have no worries at all. Luna Park is in the psyche of Sydneysiders."

That's some hubris, considering Sydney's main amusement park, Wonderland, is due to shut next month, other theme parks such as Old Sydney Town have been forced to close due to thin crowds, and Luna Park's gala opening concert tonight clashes with the first day of the Easter Show.

Doughty says this time is different, because Luna Park will be more than a fun park.

"This will become the premier function site in Sydney, no doubt about it," he says.

"Luna Park in the '60s, '70s and '80s was always a venue for uni balls and functions.

"There were always performers down here; you had stilt-walkers and a chap who used to dive off a ladder into a little pond.

"When the government called for expressions of interest in the late '90s, we looked at all that and thought, 'Why can't Luna Park be a venue again?' "

Stephen Galbraith, who manages four theme parks in Australia and South-East Asia, including the doomed Wonderland, says Luna Park will have to decisively deliver "the wow factor" to impress sophisticated, well-travelled Sydneysiders.

"If you open up something with a big noise and people walk in and it's second rate, they will not come back," he says.

"Luna Park's up against a challenge - it's got a lot of history and it's been opened and closed a number of times.

"They will have to deliver a good product."

That's where Wayne Harrison comes in.

Harrison, a former director of the Sydney Theatre Company, is in charge of entertainment for the park's opening.

"Part of my brief [was] to bring in as many different people as possible ... you really can't rely on the theme-park aspect because there are so many options in terms of how we use our leisure time these days."

Apart from extensive restorations and the return of classic rides such as the Wild Mouse and the Rotor, the park is being promoted as an entertainment precinct with free entry to the area, which will house several new entertainment venues: the refurbished Crystal Palace, the "Popcorn Hall" for kids, and the Big Top, a versatile performance space suitable for opera, music, dance parties and circuses.

Operators hope these will be the real cash cows of the venue.

Like most Sydneysiders, Harrison has a soft spot for the grinning face on the harbour.

He remembers the Luna Park scenes from Ray Lawler's 1959 film, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a play he later programmed at the STC.

When he moved from Melbourne to Sydney in the early '70s, Harrison lived nearby and spent many merry Friday nights there with friends.

Later, when he worked at the Opera House and the STC's theatre at Walsh Bay, Harrison would often gaze affectionately across the water at the park's lights and spinning rides.

"I'm glad it survived," he says. "It really is a great testament to Sydney and its harbour that it wasn't pulled down and turned into apartments."

Indeed, its heritage is the main reason the prime harbourside site hasn't been snapped up by a developer and been transformed into yet more apartments or a sterile Cockle Bay-style precinct.

But tradition and history are not big drawcards for the generation or two who have no memories of the park, and whose idea of fun is more likely to involve an Xbox than a Ferris wheel.

"We do have the young thumb generation, people who use their thumbs to entertain themselves in a video-console way," says Harrison.

"You have to be incredibly inventive in the way you lure them out of the house and into a live experience.

"The challenge becomes how you invest a new generation with a sense of its heritage, and I think the way to do that is to add some modern elements ... then you start to consolidate some of the traditional elements of the park, as well."

For Harrison, that means luring live kids' acts such as the Flying Fruit Fly Circus and Shaolin Kung-Fu martial-arts masters, and legendary acts such as the Argentine circus troupe De La Guarda, who will perform at Luna Park in late April, for grown-ups.

"You have to keep the old 1930s theme park, but into that you can introduce new streams to make the concept viable," he says.

"I'd think it's impossible to come here and not feel as though you've had a unique cultural experience, a unique Sydney experience.

"You can't claim to be a Sydneysider and not have been to Luna Park at least once.